Setting up an Amazon EC2 Virtual Machine

Setting up a cloud based instance of AgileLoad is not necessary unless you have requirements to:

Run especially large tests

Run tests to simulate users located outside of your network

Simulate users coming from different geographical locations

Run tests where internal hardware is difficult to come by

Either way you can create your scripts and jobs using your installation of AgileLoad and connect it up at a later date to AgileLoad in the cloud.

The benefits of using our cloud based install are that all of these requirements can be filled and at a low cost using Amazons EC2 pricing structure (in the order of cents per hour to run tests). In fact the Amazon EC2 pricing model is especially well suited for load testing as at the time of writing Amazon are charging (and always have) for outbound network traffic only. In load testing we generate very little outbound traffic, most of the traffic is inbound coming from the servers we are testing. More information on Amazons pricing is available here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

If you do need to run a test using EC2 then the video below explains how to do that – in fact it’s very easy as we’ve already set up an AgileLoad instance on there for you, you just need to access it and launch it. Before doing so you’ll need an Amazon EC2 account which you can set up with them using your own details and credit card details.

In the video, we launch an Amazon Instance that is preconfigured with AgileLoad. Before launching we set up a Key Pair (necessary to connect to an Amazon Instance and also necessary if you want to get the administrator password). We also set up an elastic IP address so that we have an address to connect to and finally we set up a security group which is really a firewall, here we configure ports for Agile Load and for RDP so that we can connect to the machine we have just launched.

In short, Amazon EC2 can be used to launch multiple injectors for Agile Load and those injectors can be hosted around the world. In this case we use the Amazon European data centre. This model makes a scalable, diverse and affordable platform for load testing which is why we chose to use it for these videos.